Businesses are experiencing an ever-increasing trend to achieve higher utilization of computing resources. Companies that provide their own Information technology (IT) computing services are being driven to find ways to decrease costs by increasing utilization. Moreover, companies that provide these services are being driven to reduce overhead and become more competitive by increasing utilization of these resources. Numerous studies over the past decade have shown that typical utilization levels of computing resources within service delivery centers, raised floors, and data centers fall between 20% and 80%. This leaves a tremendous amount of white space with which to improve utilization and drive costs down.
These issues are compounded by the fact that, in many instances, multiple parties compete for common resources. Such competition can occur both on an inter-organization level as well as on an intra-organization level (e.g., between business units). To this extent, none of the existing approaches address how many resources a particular party is allowed to consume. That is, none of the existing approaches provides a way to adequately ration computational resources to a party in a way that will fulfill its needs, while not preventing the needs of other parties from being met.
This problem is further exacerbated by the fact that an entity may need to secure a resource capable of delivering multiple service level requirements, e.g., an entity may need a resource at 99.9% availability and a response time of less than N seconds. Current approaches lack the ability to efficiently and easily service such compound requests. The result is that multiple requests must be made, which leads not only to an inefficient use of resources, but also to the potential for a non-optimal set of resource types being provisioned. Accordingly, there exists a need in the art to overcome the deficiencies and limitation described herein above.